Beyond Arabism vs. sovereignty: relocating ideas in the international relations of the Middle East

This article critiques constructivist approaches to the international relations of the Middle East and sets out an alternative interpretation of the role of ideas based on political economy and the sociology of knowledge. It cautions against using constructivism as a way of ‘building bridges’ between IR and Middle East Studies and disputes the claim that the norms of ‘Arabism’ as a putative regional identity are in contradiction with those of sovereignty. The article shows that this assumption is based on the combined influences of modernisation theory and Orientalist assumptions about the power and continuity of regional culture that have persisted in Middle East IR. This is despite the fact that there is no reason to believe the Arabs constitute a more ‘natural’ nation than do the Syrians, Iraqis or Egyptians. The political role and resonance of ideas can be better established by viewing the modern history of the Middle East in terms of domestic structure and social change, and in particular emphasising the role of rising middle classes in revolutionary nationalist movements. The findings of this article raise questions for the utility of ‘moderate’ constructivist interpretations of International Relations as a whole.

1HallidayFred, The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
; HallidayFred, ‘The Middle East and Conceptions of International Society’, in BuzanBarry and Gonzalez-PelaezAna (eds), International Society and the Middle East: English School Theory at the Regional Level (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
.

2Abu LughodLeila, ‘Anthropology's Orient: The Boundaries of Theory on the Arab World’, in SharabiHisham (ed.), Theory, Politics and the Arab World (Routledge, 1991)
; MitchellTimothy, ‘The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science’, GAIA (2003)
, available at: {http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3618c31x}.

3 For a concise discussion of arguments for and against Middle Eastern exceptionalism see BromleySimon, Rethinking Middle East Politics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), pp. 86–89
.

4Carl BrownL., International Politics and the Middle East: Old Rules, Dangerous Game (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984)
; Diplomacy in the Middle East: The International Relations of Regional and Outside Powers, new ed. (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004)
.

6HinnebuschRaymond, ‘The Politics of Identity in Middle East International Relations’, in FawcettLouise (ed.), International Relations of the Middle East, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 151
. For a similar perspective see two articles by Gregory Gause IIIF., ‘Balancing What? Threat Perception and Alliance Choice in the Gulf’, Security Studies, 13:2 (Winter2003),pp. 273–305
; and ‘Sovereignty, Statecraft and Stability in the Middle East’, Journal of International Affairs, 45:2 (1992), pp. 441–469
. Also, ValbjørnMorton, ‘Arab Nationalism(s) in Transformation: From Arab Interstate Societies to an Arab-Islamic World Society’, in BuzanBarry and Gonzalez-PelaezAna (eds), International Society and the Middle East: English School Theory at the Regional Level (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
.

7ValbjørnMorton, ‘The Meeting of the Twain: Bridging the Gap between International Relations and Middle East Studies’, Cooperation and Conflict, 38 (2003), pp. 163–173
.

8TetiAndrea, ‘Bridging the Gap: IR, Middle East Studies and the Disciplinary Politics of the Area Studies Controversy’, European Journal of International Relations, 13 (2007), pp. 117–143
.

9JeppersonRonald L., WendtAlexander, and KatzensteinPeter, ‘Norms, Identity and Culture in National Security’, in KatzensteinPeter (ed.), The Culture of National Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 45–59
.

16 Mitchell, ‘The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science’, p. 7.

17SaidEdward W., Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978)
.

18 Mitchell, ‘The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science’, p. 5.

19 For one interpretation of that revolution's regional effects see NahasMaridi, ‘State-Systems and Revolutionary Challenge: Nasser, Khomeini, and the Middle East’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 17:4 (November1985), pp. 507–527
.

20 The regionalist approach – not just to the Middle East but for IR in general – was formally and theoretically enshrined by political scientists like Leonard Binder, as well as Louis Cantori and Michael Brecher. For a good discussion of this literature see GergesFawaz A., The Superpowersand the Middle East: Regional and International Politics, 1955–1967 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), pp. 4–17
.

21BinderL.The Ideological Revolution in the Middle East (New York and London: Wiley, 1964), p. 264
.

22 Ibid., pp. 264–7.

23 Some, such as Rashid Khalidi, continue to bemoan the ‘wheel and spoke’ approach to the historiography of the Middle East. (Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World Annual Lecture, University of Manchester, 23 October 2009).

24KerrMalcolm H., The Arab Cold War: Gamal Abd Al-Nasir and His Rivals, 1958–1970, 3rd ed. (London: Published for the Royal Institute of International Affairs by Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 1
.

27 Fred Halliday has described these rules as ‘either generic to politics the world over or based on questionable assumptions of historic continuity’, though to be fair to Brown it is the combination of the seven rules he asserts is unique. Halliday, The Middle East in International Relations, p. 24, fn. 8
.

33KoranyBahgat, ‘International Relations Theory: Contributions from Research in the Middle East’, in TesslerMark A., NachtweyJodi, and BandaAnne (eds), Area Studies and Social Science: Strategies for Understanding Middle East Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999)
; Valbjørn, ‘The Meeting of the Twain: Bridging the Gap between International Relations and Middle East Studies’; Teti, ‘Bridging the Gap: IR, Middle East Studies and the Disciplinary Politics of the Area Studies Controversy’.

35 Hinnebusch, ‘The Politics of Identity in Middle East International Relations’, p. 160.

36 Constructivist frameworks should, moreover, be universally applicable and not ‘particularly relevant’ to the Middle East. Hinnebusch stops short of wholehearted support for constructivism by arguing it must be supplemented with ‘structuralist accounts of material constraints’. But such theoretical eclecticism seems unnecessary when structuralism alone would have no problem incorporating ideas as a variable in this way: few followers of Marx or Waltz would object to the notion that ideas are significant, but only within the constraints imposed by the material world or international system. See The international politics of the Middle East (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003)
.

37 This internal and external differentiation, and attendant Eurocentrism, has been noted with respect to general constructivist works treating identities and norms, which carry similar biases: ‘good’ norms such as human rights and respect for sovereignty originate in the West. See FinnemoreMartha and SikkinkKathryn, ‘Taking Stock: The Constructivist Research Program in International Relations and Comparative Politics’, Annual Revue of Political Science, 4 (2001), pp. 391–416
.

45HolstiK. J., The State, War, and the State of War (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
; BuzanBarry and WæverOle, Regions and Powers: the Structure of International Security (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
.

46Reus-SmitChristian, ‘The Idea of History and History with Ideas’, in HobdenStephen and HobsonJohn M. (eds), Historical Sociology of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 124
.

47TelhamiS. and BarnettM. N.Identity and Foreign Policy in the Middle East (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 12
.

48Hudson, Arab Politics, p. 2
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49 Michael Barnett himself has rightly observed that ‘constructivists have incorporated domestic variables in either an ad hoc way or by reference to institutional theories’, without any ‘rigorous theories of state-society relations’. ‘Historical Sociology and Constructivism: an Estranged Past, a Federated Future?’, in HobdenStephen and HobsonJohn M. (eds), Historical Sociology of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 104
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50 See, for example, the section on the Middle East in Buzan and Waever, Regions and Powers. See also, SnyderJack, ‘Empire: a blunt tool for democratization’, Daedalus, 134:2 (Spring 2005)
.

52BarnettMichael, ‘Institutions, Roles, and Disorder: The Case of the Arab States System’, International Studies Quarterly, 37 (1993), pp. 271–296
; ‘Sovereignty, Nationalism, and Regional Order in the Arab States System’, International Organization, 49:3 (1995), pp. 479–510
; ‘Identity and Alliances in the Middle East’, in KatzensteinPeter (ed.), The Culture of National Security (1996)
.

65MannheimK., Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960)
. Fred Halliday was also in favour of taking Mannheim seriously, though for different reasons. Halliday's concern was to rehabilitate Orientalist research after the Saidian onslaught from the 1980s. Mannheim, he argued, showed that ideas did not lose there validity on account of their provenance. See ‘“Orientalism” and its Critics’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 20:2 (1993), p. 159
.

66CarrE. H. and CoxM., The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001)
, II. For a cogent analysis of Carr's debt to, and modification of, Mannheim's sociology of knowledge see JonesCharles, ‘Carr, Mannheim, and a Post-Positivist Science of International Relations’, Political Studies, 45:2 (1997)
.

67Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, p. 66
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68Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, p. 31
. The question of intellectuals, in particular Mannheim's conception of a ‘free’ or ‘classless’ intelligentsia that collectively synthesises the ideas of society's contending classes, is a complex one that cannot be explored here. Mannheim differs sharply here with an otherwise similar sociologist of intellectuals, Antonio Gramsci, for whom intellectuals remain class-bound and ideology in the modern state is ‘bourgeois’ ideology. For a discussion of the sociology of intellectuals, see BaudMichiel and RuttenRosanne, ‘Introduction’, in BaudMichiel and RuttenRosanne (eds), Popular Intellectuals and Social Movements: Framing Protest in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
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69 For an historical discussion of this process around the world, as well as an argument for the distinctive role of the ‘political’, over the purely economic, in this transition, see AndersonPerry, Lineages of the Absolutist State, (London: NLB, 1974)
.

70 Gramsci's ideas on hegemony are directed toward the elucidation and explanation of this disguising. See, for example, GramsciAntonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York and London: International Publishers: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), p. 327
.

74BatatuHanna, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq's Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, Ba'thists and Free Officers, Reprinted ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 28
.

81Hinnebusch, International Politics of the Middle East, p. 65
. For a similar perspective see also Valbjø‘Arab Nationalism(s) in Transformation: From Arab Interstate Societies to an Arab-Islamic World Society’.

93 Peter Sluglett, review of BatatuHana, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq's Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of its Communists, Ba'thists and Free Officers, in Democratiya, 4 (2006)
.

94 For details of the agreement between Egyptian and Iraqi communists on this issue see al-AlimMahmud Amin, Confessions of the Sheikh of the Arab Communists: Mahmoud Amin Al-Alim [In Arabic] (Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli, 2006), p. 43
.

97HeydemannSteven, ‘War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East’, in HeydemannSteven (ed.), War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), section 1. Available at: {http://ark.edlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6c6006X6/}
.

99BuzanBarry and Gonzalez-PelaezAna, ‘Conclusions’, in BuzanBarry and Gonzalez-PelaezAna (eds), International Society and the Middle East: English School Theory at the Regional Level (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
; ValbjornMorton and BankAndre, ‘Signs of a New Arab Cold War: The 2006 Lebanon War and the Sunni-Shi'i Divide’, Middle East Report, 242 (Spring 2007)
; MurphyEmma, ‘Theorizing ICTs in the Arab World: Informational Capitalism and the Public Sphere’, International Studies Quarterly, 53:4 (2009)
.